Going to pickup my new MBA today...got a ?

I am going today to get a fully loaded 13" MBA i7, 4gb, 256 gb.

My questions is...I have heard that they might come with either a Toshiba drive or Samsung drive.

Is there any way to tell if it has the Samsung without booting it?

Will the store let me swap it if I boot it in the store and it has the Tosh?

 

You can't tell which SSD will ship with it unless you go into System Profiler. Honestly don't worry about it. This is what I hate about the internet, it creates a lot of unnecessary fear to the point people are scared to buy something. You won't see any difference in performance whether or not you have the Samsung or Toshiba SSD. There's software that has shown performance differences only in numbers. I haven't found one thing on the web that shows real world performance differences.

Also chances are, Apple will not exchange it for those reasons. You'd have to prove there's something truly wrong with the SSD. They won't exchange it based on what's been said on the internet. Now, if they do exchange it the first time, they won't exchange it again. Anyways getting a Toshiba drive should be the least of your worries. That's not even a defect. Just be thankful if you get a MBA with no dead or stuck pixels, smooth hinge, sits even on the table without wobble and not creaky.

Your first MBA might be perfect and then you go and exchange it because of the Toshiba SSD and then you may just get another Toshiba SSD plus the problems I listed above. If everything is working fine then enjoy your machine.

 

If anything, I would be more worried about getting a display that has a dark region near the bottom or anyone of the other issues previously mentioned. I think many people have blown the whole Toshiba SSD thing way out of proportion especially since it still provides speeds above and beyond what hard drives do and, as pointed out, I highly doubt you would notice a true difference in the real world. Besides, I didn't think Apple offered the i7 MBA's in the stores, I thought you could only order those. If you ask me, it is a wasteful upgrade especially since you probably won't notice any difference between that and the i5 processor. Even benchmarks don't put the i7 above the i5 by all that much. It reminds me a lot of the i5 13" MBP and the i7 13" MBP. I went with the i7 version thinking I would notice a drastic difference and, quite honestly, I could not notice a difference between that and a friend's i5 13" MBP and the benchmarks even pointed to only small differences between them as well.

 

Hope you realize the Samsung "SSD" isn't the 470 that people rave about. Just saying. It's not a world beater.

It's slower than the slow Kingston V+100. Slower than the slow "Apple SSDs" in the MBPs.

Also, as mentioned above, the i7 was a pointless upgrade, especially for a 13 inch. It's even worse than the i5 -> i7 upgrade on the base 13 MBP. It's closer in worthlessness to a 2720qm -> 2820qm upgrade.

 

you can return it within 14 days, no restocking fee.

 

What basis do you have for those statements? The Toshiba drive has the same controller as the Kingston V+100. The Samsung is faster than the Toshiba, not slower.

Here are Xbench results from the Samsung drive in the 2011 MBA (source is Ars Technica, link here):



For comparison, there are Xbench results for a Samsung 470 in a 2011 MBP 15 in this YouTube video:

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Note that the results are essentially equivalent.

I tend to agree. Lots of benchmarks at AnandTech here showing 5-10% difference. I would have expected a larger difference due to TurboBoost frequency (2.3 vs. 2.9) but maybe there's throttling.

For web browsing, office applications, watching video, etc. you'll notice no difference. Then again, you won't really notice a difference vs. the 2010 C2D models either. If you're doing video editing it looks like the improvement will be around 10%. Is that worth the $100 upgrade? Not for me anyway.

 

That's cool. The Samsung drives are faster than the Toshiba drives, that's fine. But MBAs don't have regular SSDs, in case you couldn't tell from the design already.

MBA Samsung 256GB SSD (larger = faster)



Source: Review Apple MacBook Air 13 Mid 2011 (1.7 GHz, 256 GB SSD) Subnotebook - Notebookcheck.net Reviews

Kingston V+100 96 GB (remember size does matter)



Source: Kingston V+ 100 96GB SSD Review



Source: http://forum.notebookreview.com/sol...thread-benchmarks-brands-news-advice-966.html

Kingston V+100 128GB:


Source: http://www.legitreviews.com/article/1556/5/

 

They're the same as any other SSD minus the case.

Also, all your comparisons are meaningless because the MBA result you posted was running in Windows which is limited to IDE mode. You're comparing one drive tested in IDE mode with an out of date version of CrystalDiskMark against drives tested in AHCI mode with a current version of the benchmark.

EDIT: I see 2hvy4grvty has changed his moniker. I wouldn't have responded if I knew it was you. Go troll somewhere else.

 

MBA has the same SSD as any other SSD. The only difference is the others are incapsulated and the MBA's modules just plug onto the motherboard.

 

I picked up the i7 13" MBA today.

Cost is not an issue, I write it off for work. I am going to run some test tomorrow.

My main reason for getting the i7 is for video encoding.

I will run the same file on my 2010 MBA vs the new MBA.

Lets see what SSD I have.

 

for video encoding, the new MBA will be much faster than the old one.

the SSD won't matter.

 

Powered it up, I have the Samsung SSD SM256C.

Loading up my backup from my 2010 MBA now....they will end up being identical....so I will be able to run some tests.

 

SSDs matter quite a bit depending on if your using a scratch disk and the length of the video your editing (and all the other specs of the video). Especially since its shared VRAM with a fix RAM amount.

Personally I would have never gone with a MBA for video editing, you could have spent less and got more with a MBP 13" and it would have been faster, also allowing you to attach more tools and camera's to it as well. Not to mention that they are not upgradable.

However, if your just trying to take a quick peak then I could see that.

 

SSD doesn't really help all that much in terms of video encoding where the processor is going to be the bottleneck. Encoding speeds definitely haven't increased all that much in me switching from a 7200RPM hard drive to a 120GB SSD (with various read and write speeds of about 480MB/s) and it still takes about 50 minutes to encode a 90 minute 480p mpeg-4 AVC video (with stereo AAC audio at 128kbps) from a source DVD (after having ripped the DVD onto my SSD). That is down from about 55 minutes when ripping to my hard drive first. With something like that, the processor is always going to be the bottleneck at least until companies start releasing software that can use the Intel HD 3000 for encoding (it can be used as such taking only 4-5 minutes to do the same thing I am doing).

 

Ahh true just encoding no, but if your talking about actively editing it would be different. Encoding is just having it throw crap on the drive, and it doesn't have to keep the whole thing active.

 

Right. Editing is different since the SSD is going through constant read/write cycles with changing data. I have noticed drastic increases in editing performance where it now takes only a few seconds to add a 1GB movie to a project instead of taking a few minutes. The encoding process hasn't really increased but anything else does. It is also nice that it takes less than 10 seconds to cold boot my system and not even a full bounce in the dock for a program to open.

 

Dude thats nice. I am still fooling with my SSD on my PC... there be some big problems with those things. I gotta flash it, then secure-erase using a utility running in Linux... plus there are some weird issues with my raid board as well... sigh... yet another day in tech land lol

 

he was asking about encoding, looks like you figured it out.

 

OK, I know you really can't compare the top 13" 2010 MBA to the top 13" 2011 MBA...but.

I ran a video encoder of the same file on both machines.

2010 2 hours 7 minutes
2011 1 hour 15 minutes

Almost cut the time in half, going to save me a lot of time.

Glad I made the upgrade.

 

You can compare them all you want, I don't think anyone is going to stop you especially since you are trying to determine if the upgrade was worth it. I don't see an issue in running your own tests between what you had and what you just purchased. That is what review sites do all the time when new MBP's or MBA's come out, they want to compare them to the previous generation to see if the newer hardware really makes a difference.

Granted, the processor in the 2010 MBA was old as dirt so you are going to see a more dramatic increase in performance instead of a more casual increase if Apple had gone from Core 2 Duo to Core i5 and then Core i5 Sandy Bridge processors.

 

sure you can - you just did. this seems right. encoding is going to be far and away the best way to differentiate their performance.

 

Well that makes sense, I don't think anyone is disputing if the 2011 is faster than the 2010, it should be. You're going from a Core 2 Duo to a Sandy Bridge processor. I think some people here are more concerned about the 2011 models with the Samsung SSD vs. the Toshiba having any real-world performance differences. That remains to be seen.

 

Yeah- this isn't news or anything, but it looks accurate.